Abstract This essay is a close philosophical reading of Philippe Grandrieux's expanded video production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, first commissioned by the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Belgium where it premiered in spring 2023. The argument takes its conceptual and analytical inspiration from Gilles Deleuze's account of sensation in The Logic of Sensation and his seminars on painting, with special attention to Grandrieux's refashioning of desire and the female body in terms of its potential figural multiplicities. Grandrieux's work inspires a question: What is an Image? Not an image or images, all of which belong to the domain of representation, but rather the figural Image in its power and complexity.
Abstract This essay reads Eve Kosofsky's Sedgwick's memoir A Dialogue on Love to unfold several aspects of her poetics: an erotics of bristling criticism, an ethics of delicate attention, and a politics of rescue acutely aware of its own destructive impulses and motives. It proposes the ongoing relevance of her commitment to a personal voice that walks the line between intimacy and criticism, and that is oriented toward ecological questions of system and environment, of survival, nourishment, and poeisis.
Abstract Prosopopoeia defines legal and discursive efforts to cognize, and to exempt ourselves from, extinction. The figure of the Anthropocene, for instance, fits a human mask onto the modulation of life and nonlife down to geological substrata; it personifies destructive ideologies (such as nuclear colonialism and imperialism) and their remediation and redemption (such as a present consciousness and a present conscience born backward from the future apocalypse). Albert Serra's 2022 film Pacifiction, the foremost of three case studies, denaturalizes the brutal mechanisms through which combinations of particularities and differences—such as the figure of the racialized and transfeminine sex worker—are made to signify global destitution. To deface late liberalism is to treat the reproduction of its regime as a set of foundationless discursive and aesthetic maneuvers.
Abstract This paper attends to disordered eating not simply as a socially determined malady but as a form of maladjusted and disorderly embodiment that engenders relations both social and antisocial. While indigestion appears in one respect as an eminently individualized process—playing out as it does, inside the gut—it reveals, when considered as method, a social dimension of disordered eating that has been largely elided in accounts of its causes or cures. Working against conventional feminist and medical conceptualizations of nonnormative eating practices as pathological and in need of extinguishment, the authors draw on insights from trans studies, mad studies, and critical disability studies to counter the notion that food and social life are inextricable and uniformly positive, and to elaborate and offer (anti-)social strategies of restriction, reversal, and rage. Rather than framing eating as an act intrinsically attached to conviviality, the paper presents a range of possibilities for collective corporeal and social indigestion.
Abstract This essay reconstructs and reconsiders a lineage of work in feminist sts and new materialism that inherits from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's writings on microbial sexuality. Several feminist and queer theorists have argued that our conceptions of sex and gender could be expanded or liberated by learning new sexual possibilities from bacteria. These projects surreptitiously impose traditional sexual categories in order to claim that bacteria escape them; they show the oppressive and liberatory positions to be nonoppositional. This article turns to deconstruction to think through the consequences of this nonoppositionality. A deconstruction of life science and sexual difference challenges the pretense of “new materialist” research to receive from nature, matter, or life what depends on the active intervention of a reading. Nonetheless, this deconstructive practice of reading also destabilizes the foundations of “poststructuralist” accounts of sex and gender, such as Judith Butler's, which argues that culture “produces” nature.
